One of the great features of the Instant Pot electric pressure cookers is the versatility and multi functionality of them. One of the most used functions and a relatively new advance with electric pressure cookers is the sauté function.

Sautéing is a method of cooking food with a small amount of oil or fat at relatively high heat. Food that is sautéed is browned while preserving its texture, moisture and flavour. A typical use of sautéing is to brown or sear meat and perhaps vegetables before pressure cooking or slow cooking.

The new Instant Pot IP-LUX60 is equipped with an advanced sautéing/browning function key. 3 temperature levels can be chosen by toggling through the options with the “Adjust” key for best results.

The “Sauté” function can also be used to thicken sauces after pressure cooking, by adding 1 tsp of cornflour mixed in some water and cooking through or simply evaporating the liquid content. In fact, it can be used for anything that you would normally do in a sauce pan, e.g warming soup, reheating porridge, etc.

During sautéing, the lid needs to be opened at all time to avoid pressure building up. If the lid is closed, the display will show a flashing “Lid”. Alternatively one of the Instant Pot glass lids can be used (available later in the year) to enable you to see what is going on.

The procedure for using the “Sauté” function is as follows.

Press the “Sauté” function key.
Select a temperature with the “Adjust” key for “Normal”, “More” or “Less”.
When Instant Pot reaches the given working temperature, it displays “Hot” and you can start sautéing/browning.
One full “Sauté” session will run for 30 minutes.
You can cancel it at any time by pressing the “Cancel/Keep Warm” key and continue with a pressure cooking or slow cooking function.

The saute button can be found on the bottom left of the control panel.

In the UK we are launching the latest version of the successful US model. Below I am outlining some of the key features which I will expand over the next few days.

It has a Sauté/browning function with 3 different temperature settings, ranging from 105~170° C (221-338°F). You can use “Adjust” button to choose “Less” for low temperature, “More” for high temperature (close to olive oil smoking point) and “Normal” in between. Sauté is done with the lid opened. This function can also be used to thicken/reduce sauces after cooking.

Following the same line of reasoning, we added 3 temperature settings for “Slow Cook”, ranging 88-99°C (190-210°F), again adjustable with “Adjust” button. These correspond to low, normal and high temperature cooking in common slow cookers.

We also extended the manual cooking time to 120 minutes to cook tough dry food in one cooking cycle.

We are very excited today because we are about 1 week away from the launch of our first Instant Pot model in the UK.

When the design process started over 3 years ago the intention was to create a smart cooking appliance so that cooking process to a user is “instant”, i.e. at the press of a button. Of course, being a pressure cooker Instant Pot also speeds up cooking substantially.

‘Lux’ has been on sale in the US and Canada for over a year and has consistently been the No1 selling pressure cooker on Amazon US. We are delighted to be introducing the product to the UK and feel sure it will be as popular as it is in the US and Canada.

At the moment our focus is on creating awareness of the product and just what it is capable of. Perhaps the time of year could be better for the launch but we wanted to make it available as quickly as possible.

I hope you will find the answers to questions on this website, please feel free to email us if you have a question.

Instant Pot facilitates a brand new way of cooking, allowing unlimited creativity. If you have a favourite recipe, please share your recipe with others. We shall post your recipe to the Instant Pot Recipe section and will choose a winner every month for a small gift.

Hello Helen, For information on the pot-in-pot method please visit the following webpage: https://instantpot3.wordpress.com/2016/06/25/pip/ If you have any questions please feel free to reach out, Sorley